Facebook will add Skype video chat

Facebook adds Skype video chat to your pages in order to spice up the appeal of the world's No. 1 Internet service for social networks, while defending the increasing competition from Google.

The agreement, announced by chief executive Mark Zuckerberg Facebook in Palo Alto company, California, headquarters on Wednesday, deepening the cooperation of the company Microsoft Corp, which is in the process of buying Skype.

Microsoft has 1.6 percent of Facebook and has announced its U.S. $ 8.5 billion purchase of Skype in May.

Zuckerberg said Facebook has reached a record 750 million users. The new service, which will arrive on Wednesday, could be a big boost for Skype, which currently has around 145 million regular users.

Facebook Skype service, initially limited one to a video chat is free. Financial details of the agreement, if any, were not disclosed.

Skype CEO of Tony Bates said Wednesday's agreement with Facebook was just the beginning of a potentially lucrative partnership.

"For us, this makes perfect business sense," Bates said in the case of Palo Alto. "We have tremendous scope. In the future, we are talking also eventually have paid Skype products available in Web format that we saw here today."

In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Neil Stevens, the general manager of Skype's consumer business, said the company was planning to introduce a payment service that allows Facebook users to make calls to landlines and mobiles.

Stevens said he could not give a timeframe for this service is available, and said details on whether the service would work with Facebook called currency loans had not yet been resolved.

Facebook also unveiled a group messaging feature, adding to its already existing text chat is to return the fire of Google, which last week presented the heat of competition by introducing a network service Google + social call.

While many of the features of Google + 's social networking are similar to those already available in Facebook, Google is generating interest with its role as videoconferencing, which allows up to 10 people in the service to participate in a video call .

Zuckerberg hinted that the video chat several people could eventually be available in Facebook, but said that most video chats today occur between two people.

"We think this is awesome, because we are using the best technology out there to video chat with the best social infrastructure that is out there to create some really cool new scenarios," said Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg said the ads on Wednesday were the first of several that come in what he described as "the launch of the 2011 season."

Source :www.taipeitimes.com